I am very excited for these additions to the game. Unidentified dyes with achievement points, obsidian shards? Yes please! Guild missions? Double yes! Guesting coming soon? Sweet! My bet is guild missions and guesting will be implemented in the same patch. Oh, and I want that Chauncy von Snuffles III! Kitty with gentleman's hat?! YES!

I am very excited for these additions to the game. Unidentified dyes with achievement points, obsidian shards? Yes please! Guild missions? Double yes! Guesting coming soon? Sweet! My bet is guild missions and guesting will be implemented in the same patch. Oh, and I want that Chauncy von Snuffles III! Kitty with gentleman's hat?! YES!

Don't hype yourself too much! Unidentified dyes, obsidian shards and such will probably just cost real life money. Guild missions will probably be some fetch quests, and guesting will only make you able to visit your friends personal home instance and nothing more! And Chauncy von Snuffles III will probably not have a gentleman's hat at all, he will probably just be the grumpy cat!

You know, one of the things I love about GW2 is they continually take ideas I had 6 years ago and make them a reality. Spendable achievement points? Oh Hell yeah. Depending on what that Endless Mystery Cat Tonic is I may need it. >_>

Don't hype yourself too much! Unidentified dyes, obsidian shards and such will probably just cost real life money. Guild missions will probably be some fetch quests, and guesting will only make you able to visit your friends personal home instance and nothing more! And Chauncy von Snuffles III will probably not have a gentleman's hat at all, he will probably just be the grumpy cat!

Lol at ANet talking about Player/Community relationships, considering PR is definitely one of their weaker areas.

On the actual news, very happy about all of it, if there was one thing I think GW2 was lacking, it was the chance to get cosmetic rewards in the open world and this is definitely one step forward in that direction with their expansion of the achievement system.

I wish for NPCs similar to Collector's from original Guild Wars who traded somewhat useless junk you got from enemies for anything from bevarage, food to special looking armour pieces, like the chaos gloves everyone loved.

Was that literally the first mention of Guesting by ANet since the first week of September?

Of course, no actual time-table on any of this stuff. Just "Hey these are things we want to do. Eventually. Maybe." So basically, buy an MMO, expect features that may want to actually keep you playing after 12 months, rewarding those that stuck around, rather than keeping and enjoying a larger playerbase because they all got bored and now you're hoping someone tells them of this stuff and can convince them to come back.

Was that literally the first mention of Guesting by ANet since the first week of September?

Of course, no actual time-table on any of this stuff. Just "Hey these are things we want to do. Eventually. Maybe." So basically, buy an MMO, expect features that may want to actually keep you playing after 12 months, rewarding those that stuck around, rather than keeping and enjoying a larger playerbase because they all got bored and now you're hoping someone tells them of this stuff and can convince them to come back.

Hence, why I laughed at ANet talking about PR. The fact they have a screen up with the Achievement rewards is heartening at least. They really do need to implement the things that they've been talking about for a while now though, like guesting and observer mode, it's easy to say you're working on it, but the fact that both of those have been talked about since launch, and they can't even give us a time-table on those is a bit maddening.

Not to be a downer, all the things talked about in this blog post are exciting, it's just annoying not knowing if we'll be seeing this stuff next month, or next year.

•The concept behind this is to allow players to earn new rewards for achievements, as well as progressing down achievement paths that take advantage of the open world experience. We’ll add tokens for your achievement you can turn in to select from a list of rewards, including new reward types like ascended gear and infusions.

•We’ll add support so daily achievements will be different each day of the week, which will help drive players to different areas of the world and play together. Later, we’ll also be adding a system that lets you complete a subgroup of achievements to fulfill your daily. For example, if there are 6 daily achievements available, you’ll only need to do 4 of the 6. So you can choose the achievements that you’re most interested in.

•You won’t see another tier between ascended and legendary in 2013 for example.

•To that end, we’re working on adding new types of content to the game in early 2013 that will allow guilds to go on missions together. Some of these missions may be content designed specifically for the guild to accomplish within certain constraints or time requirements while others see the creation of new content by a guild/s everyone in the world can experience.

•Firstly, we’ll be adding paid server transfers, with time limitations and WvW restrictions, and guestingability, which allows players to visit friends on other servers in every part of the game except for WvW.

•Second, we’ll make improvements to culling. We recently ran small tests on Live to help us move towards eliminating as much culling from WvW as possible. The results have been promising, and we have a number of additional culling features in development. If all goes well, our hope is 2013 is the year culling ceases to exist, or is as minimal as possible in the WvW experience.

•We’ll introduce a system of prestige and advancement specifically designed for WvW. This will give players a progression path where they earn new WvW-only abilities and bonuses, and with them gain prestige and visible titles/recognition

•We’ll be adding systems that make it easier for players who are less competitive to get matched only against people with similar skill sets, and stronger methods for players learning PvP to do so in a safe and fun environment with more information to help their skills grow.

•things like being able to watch other competitors and see major ranked matches to learn how to play better, the ability to host your own custom arenas to setup your own rules and host your own team practices, and visible places for everyone to see rankings of the best teams/players in the world.

•Leaderboards on our website where you can compare your abilities with other players to find out who is the best in the world.

* Expanded and re-designed encounters for bosses in dungeons and the open world.

* New types of achievements which tie into the new systems of achievement rewards.

* Continuing to improve the security of the game fighting botters and hackers, as well as improving the games stability by addressing bugs as quickly as possible when they are reported.

* Identifying existing parts of the game that can be improved and made more fun/exciting, and investing the time to ensure everything we’ve built really shines as we move forward.

* Improving the new player experience, to make it easier for new players to learn how to play GW2, enter the game world, and more quickly learn the game without being overwhelmed.

* Improving the “looking for group” tool to make it easier to find other players to play with in the game.

* The improvements and fixes to the fractal dungeons, detailed in Isaiah Cartwright’s blog post.

Well, the blog post is about the first half of 2013, so most of it should be out within the next 5 months.

Yes, and guesting was talked about all through beta as something that was going to be a part of the game at release, and here we are, 5 months later. Understand technical difficulties occur, and rarely do things ever go according to plan. Would rather ANet released a smaller blog post telling us what we can reliably see and what their priorities are set on, and get more of them throughout the months as things release, rather than one big post and then wait months to see what comes out when.

Saw this earlier, got me pretty excited. I still play the game casually, as I did at launch, so the game still has that “fresh” feeling, at least for me. Which is great. Can’t wait till the map expands and we can go to places like Woodland Cascades and Far Shiverpeaks. Which probably won’t happen for long tough :/ But the future of Guild Wars 2 seems bright.

Was that literally the first mention of Guesting by ANet since the first week of September?

Of course, no actual time-table on any of this stuff. Just "Hey these are things we want to do. Eventually. Maybe." So basically, buy an MMO, expect features that may want to actually keep you playing after 12 months, rewarding those that stuck around, rather than keeping and enjoying a larger playerbase because they all got bored and now you're hoping someone tells them of this stuff and can convince them to come back.

Hmm some people in D3 forum myself included would gladly grab the torches and pitchforks.